Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering.

Understanding Culture:

· Reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law.

· Uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in which meanings are manufactured as lives are ordered in particular social settings: personal life; education; health; the city and law.

· Presents case studies that illustrate what the new cultural studies looks like, covering: colonialism; everyday life and identity; and technology.

Understanding Culture will be invaluable reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology.